Triassic Mites Join World's Oldest Amber Animal Finds (Pictures)

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Triassic Mites Join World's Oldest Amber Animal Finds (Pictures)

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Goldbugs

Two newfound, 230-million-year-old mites (pictured), along with an extinct insect related to gnats and mosquitoes, are the oldest animals yet found in amber—by more than a hundred million years, a new study says. (Related: "Ancient Praying Mantis Found in Amber.")

Found among 70,000 droplets of amber from northeastern Italy, the arthropods—invertebrates with exoskeletons and segmented bodies—may look like "alien creatures," in the words of study leader David Grimaldi. But, he added, they're remarkably similar to modern gall mites.

One significant difference is that today's gall mites parasitize flowering plants, while the new species lived before flowering plants evolved—hinting at the resilience of the basic mite "design."

"Despite all that evolutionary change—this is a hundred million years before flowering plants; there was no Atlantic Ocean; dinosaurs hadn't evolved—gall mites don't seem to have changed very much," said Grimaldi, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

As for these specific mites, they were probably the architects of their own demise, he said. The resin that ultimately fossilized into amber could have been secreted by a tree after the mites had begun feeding on it—leading Harvard entomologist Brian Farrell to comment, "Live by the sword, die by the sword."

The newfound mites join a growing cast of prehistoric species preserved in amber, including a few other record holders, such as this 125-million-year-old snail, the oldest yet discovered in the hardened resin.

Discovered in the mid-1990s in Lebanon, a location rich in amber finds, this specimen is similar to tiny land-dwelling snails found today on forest floors and dead wood in Europe and the Middle East. Amber-preserved snails are relative rarities, with only a few known examples.

Tiny grains attached to an amber-encased insect's tail form the oldest known evidence for insect pollination, according to a May 2012 study.

The 110-million-year-old fossil suggests plants may have been using insect pollinators even before the evolution of bees, the oldest of which dates to about a hundred million years ago. (See "Oldest-Ever Bee Found in Amber.")

The insect, a species of thrips, was among six found in amber from northern Spain. The thrips had hundreds of grains of pollen on their bodies and specialized hairs seemingly adapted for pollen collection.

Researchers concluded the grains were from a gingko tree, which does not produce flowers. "Thrips might indeed turn out to be one of the first pollinator groups in geological history, long before evolution turned some of them into flower pollinators," study co-author Carmen Soriano said in a statement.

The oldest known gecko fossil still has clearly visible lamellae, or sticky toe hairs, which allow modern geckos to climb even smooth surfaces, according to a 2008 study.

Found in Myanmar, the lizard is at least 97 million years old, 40 million years older than the next oldest gecko. The rest of the reptile was not preserved—it may have been a dinosaur's lunch, the researchers said in a statement.

This particular specimen would have been less than an inch (2.5 centimeters) long but was probably a juvenile of a roughly foot-long (30-centimeter-long) species, the team concluded. (Related picture: oldest spider web in amber.)

Photograph courtesy George Poinar, Jr., Oregon State University

Parasite, Paralyzed

It looks like a fairly normal fly, but this 39-million-year-old insect is part of the Stylops genus, which lives inside and parasitizes the guts of other insects. The amber-encased bug is also said to be both the oldest and largest known male Stylops specimen.

The flies feed on only bats' blood, and the fossil here shows that the narrowly adapted insects have been around for at least half as long as bats themselves, which arose at least 50 million years ago.

Bat flies leave their hosts only to mate, which is probably what this fly was attempting to do when it became trapped in sticky tree resin.